Phew! The Baltimore Orioles won a game this week for the first time since Aug. 2. Among the victories there were 19 consecutive defeats.
That puts them tied with the 2005 Kansas City Royals for the longest losing streak in the wild-card era. But hey, the silver lining is that Baltimore didn’t reach the depths of its 1988 Orioles predecessors, who set an American League record with a 21-game losing streak. And the Orioles fell four full games away from the longest losing streak of the modern era, which was the 23-game Phillies in 1961. And if we go even further back to baseball’s foggy past, two teams in the century XIX had even longer losing streaks.
There have been 20 losing streaks since 1900 of 17 games or more, including one for the Arizona Diamondbacks earlier this season. While Baltimore lands on that list, it’s just another long losing streak, right?
Not really. The Orioles may have ended their streak before setting some unwanted long records, but the three weeks of Baltimore experiencing nothing but pain, despair and defeat may well have been the worst extended stretch of baseball in modern baseball history. sport.
To reach that conclusion, let’s dive a little deeper into the final loss tally and consider how uncompetitive the Orioles were. To make our point, we will examine the 20 losing streaks of 17 games or more that have occurred since 1900. We will rank them in reverse order, from lowest to highest run differential.
By that yardstick, where do the Orioles rank in the exclusive category of baseball’s worst losing streaks? And what do the O’s have to look forward to? How long did it take for each of those losing teams to improve?
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